Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson

by S. C. Gwynne

  Of “Stonewall Jackson’s way.”

  We see him now, the old slouched hat

  Cocked o’er his eye askew;

  The shrewd, dry smile, the speech so pat,

  So calm, so blunt, so true.

  The “Blue-Light Elder” knows ’em well;

  Says he, “That’s Banks, he’s fond of shell;

  Lord save his soul! We’ll give him hell,”

  That’s “Stonewall Jackson’s way.”

  Silence! Ground arms! Kneel all! Caps off !

  Old “Blue Light’s” going to pray.

  Strangle the fool that dares to scoff !

  Attention! It’s his way.

  Appealing from his native sod,

  “Hear us, hear us Almighty God,

  Lay bare Thine arm; stretch forth Thy rod!”

  That’s “Stonewall Jackson’s way.”

  He’s in the saddle now. Fall in!

  Steady! The whole brigade!

  Hill’s at the ford cut off. We’ll win

  His way out, ball and blade!

  What matter if our shoes are worn?

  What matter if our feet are torn?

  “Quick-step! We’re with him before morn!”

  That’s “Stonewall Jackson’s way.”

  The sun’s bright lances rout the mists

  Of morning, and, by George!

  Here’s Longstreet struggling in the lists,

  Hemmed in an ugly gorge.

  Pope and his Yankees, whipped before,

  “Bayonets and grape!” hear Stonewall roar;

  “Charge, Stuart! Pay off Ashby’s score!”

  In “Stonewall Jackson’s way.”

  Ah! Maiden, wait and watch and yearn

  For news of Stonewall’s band!

  Ah! Widow, read, with eyes that burn,

  That ring upon thy hand.

  Ah! Wife, sew on, pray on, hope on;

  Thy life shall not be all forlorn;

  The foe had better ne’er been born

  That gets in “Stonewall’s way.”

  Jackson had a contentious relationship with his fame, which he battled with a combination of flight and prayer. Cheers from his men would usually prompt him to spur and gallop away. It was said that Little Sorrel understood his master’s wishes and would speed up as soon as he heard shouting. Though Jackson had vowed not to read newspapers, he was aware that the press was full of his exploits, and he wrote Anna to caution her, in words that might have been drawn from his own prayers, to ignore them. “Don’t trouble yourself about representations that are made of your husband,” he wrote. “These things are earthly and transitory. There are real and glorious blessings, I trust, in reserve for us beyond this life. It is best for us to keep our eyes fixed upon the throne of God and the realities of a more glorious existence beyond the verge of time. It is gratifying to be beloved and to have our conduct approved by our fellow-men, but this is not worthy to be compared with the glory that is in reservation for us in the presence of our glorified Redeemer.”12 (Italics added.)

  He often included the same sorts of caveats in his thank-you notes for the many gifts he received, which included everything from gilded spurs, gold braid, and dress swords to socks, scarves, and apple pies. “My Dear Mrs. Osburn,” he wrote in one letter, “Your very kind note and beautiful and useful presents from your daughter have been received. Please give my thanks to her, and accept them for yourself. I know of none who rejoices more than myself at your release from that thralldom to which you refer [Federal occupation], but you must not overestimate me in the work. I have been but the unworthy instrument whom it has pleased God to use in accomplishing his purpose.”13

  But he did more than just redirect credit for his victories to the divinity. During this interlude, Jackson, who believed that godliness among his troops would help win the war—and by contrast blasphemies such as carrying mail on Sunday might doom the cause—began to play a more active role in his army’s religious life. He had always done this, to some extent. But now, and for the next seven months, he went at it more systematically. Though he would consent, in the absence of a pastor, to lead prayers, he himself never proselytized, never preached, never criticized any soldier for failure to attend religious services. His work was entirely behind the scenes, ensuring that Christian pamphlets were distributed in camp, recruiting regimental chaplains, lobbying Richmond for more money to pay them, sometimes donating his own money, and arranging for popular preachers to give sermons. His efforts coincided with the wave of Christian revival meetings that pulsed through Jackson’s camps that fall. They were partly the product of the eighteen months the soldiers had spent in close proximity to death and their concerns about their own spiritual salvation. They were partly due to the work of preachers who saw a ripe opportunity to save souls. Jackson loved all of it, and attended as many camp meetings and services as possible, especially those featuring the Reverend Joseph Stiles, whom he particularly liked. He was delighted when more than one hundred men from the Stonewall Brigade showed up for a meeting. “It appears that we may look for growing piety and many conversions in the army,” Jackson wrote Reverend Dabney happily.14

  Though a deacon’s bench was the closest Jackson ever came to the ministry, people sometimes treated him as though he had pastoral, if not saintly, powers. On one occasion, in October at Bunker Hill, a young woman approached Jackson while he was on his horse, lifted up her eighteen-month-old son, and asked the general to bless him. “He turned to her with great earnestness,” wrote an observer, “and with a pleasant expression on his stern face took the child in his arms, held it to his breast, closed his eyes and seemed to be, and I doubt not was, occupied for a minute or two with prayer, during which we took off our hats and the young mother leaned her head over the horse’s shoulder as if uniting in prayer. . . . When he finished he handed the child back to its mother without a word, who thanked him with streaming eyes while he rode off back down the road.”15

  There were signs, too, that Jackson, though separated from Anna and thus from that more animated and emotional side of his personality, had not entirely lost his ability to relax. His unique relationship with Jeb Stuart deepened during this time. During the fall camp the two visited each other frequently, and soldiers marveled not only at how Stuart was allowed to kid Jackson, but also how Jackson seemed to save his few stillborn attempts at humor for his swashbuckling friend. One night Stuart arrived at a late hour at Jackson’s headquarters to find the general asleep. Instead of returning to his own camp, he took off his saber and lay down next to Jackson to sleep, which touched off a nightlong struggle for the single blanket. The next morning Stuart awoke to find Jackson and some of his staff warming themselves by a campfire.

  “Good morning!” said Stuart. “How are you?”

  “General Stuart, I am always glad to see you here,” Jackson replied. “You might select better hours sometime, but I am always glad to have you. But General,” he said, rubbing his legs, “you must not get into my bed with your boots and spurs on and ride me around like a cavalry horse all night!”16

  At about that time the dapper Stuart, tired of seeing Jackson in the same tattered coat, had commissioned a tailor in Richmond to make Jackson a new one of fine wool, with gilt buttons and lace. He sent his aide Heros Von Borcke to Jackson with the carefully wrapped gift. Jackson opened it, gazed at it for a moment in “modest confusion,” then said, “Give General Stuart my best thanks, Major. The coat is much too handsome for me, but I shall take the best care of it, and shall prize it highly as a souvenir.”17 He folded it carefully and placed it in his portmanteau.

  But Von Borcke was under orders from Stuart to press the issue, and insisted that Jackson try it on. He did, it fit perfectly, and he liked it so much that he wore it to dinner that night, to the slack-jawed amazement of Jim and his staff. Word of the general’s new coat spread quickly through the camp, and soon soldiers were running to see it for themselves. Jackson was very pleased with his frien
d’s gift, which he would eventually wear into battle—thus shocking the rest of the army, too. He wrote Stuart, “I am much obliged for the beautiful coat you have presented me. . . . When you come near don’t forget to call & see me. Your much attached friend.”18

  Jackson proved that he could be unpredictable in other ways, too. Shortly after the Battle of Antietam, a Virginia man had invited Jackson and his staff to dinner. Before the meal, the host appeared with a decanter of whiskey and asked if anyone would like an “appetizer.” To the amazement of the group, Jackson, instead of politely declining, asked, “Have you got any white sugar?” The answer was yes. Jackson strode to the table, and, with “a skill and ease which seemed shocking in contrast to his reputation,” mixed himself a toddy, drank it off, complimented the host on the flavor, then offered some to General D. H. Hill and Henry Kyd Douglas.19

  “Mr. Douglas,” Jackson said, “you will find it very nice.”

  Douglas demurred, saying he had a headache and that he did not like the taste of “spirituous liquors” anyway.

  Jackson’s reply surprised his listeners. “In that I differ with you and most men,” he said. “I like the taste of all spirituous liquors. I can sip whiskey or brandy with a spoon with the same pleasure the most delicious coffee or cordial will give you. I am the fondest man of liquor in this army and if I had indulged my appetite I would have been a drunkard. But liquors are not good for me. I question whether they are much good to anyone. At any rate I rarely touch them.”20 Douglas recalled seeing Jackson take a glass of wine only a few times during the war. Liquor, like his own soaring ambition, was so seductive that it needed to be forcibly suppressed.

  • • •

  While Stonewall Jackson was resting and reorganizing his troops that fall—he and James Longstreet had both been promoted to lieutenant general on October 10, each commanding half of Lee’s army—George Brinton McClellan, the erstwhile young Napoléon, was losing his moorings. Though he crowed about his “victory” over Lee, he had done nothing to follow it up, nothing to make it stick. In spite of warm, dry weather, custom-made for fighting a war—and with flooding rains and cold weather looming ahead—he refused to move. He cited the by now familiar litany of reasons why he could not: exhausted troops and horses, lack of clothing and shoes, lack of wagons, a river too deep to cross or not deep enough to protect Washington, Lee’s superior numbers, etc. And this drove Lincoln, Halleck, the War Department, the Republican press, and much of Congress to distraction. Halleck noted that after urging McClellan to move during the first week of October, to no avail, he had “peremptorily ordered” him on October 6 “to cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy.”21 This, too, produced no results. Lincoln followed with more gentle prodding. “You remember my speaking to you of your over-cautiousness,” he wrote his general on October 13, as though lecturing a troublesome child. “Are you not over-cautious when you assume that you can not do what the enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in prowess, and act upon that claim? . . . It is easy if our troops march as well as the enemy; and it is unmanly to say they can not do it.”22

  But McClellan was feeling powerful again. He had rejuvenated a discouraged army. He had saved the North from a Confederate invasion. He had the love of his men and plenty of political support from Democrats in a country whose fall elections were about to tilt in their direction. At the same time, he could see quite clearly that his tormentor, Lincoln, was facing bitter attacks from a wide spectrum of political interests. The president was denounced as a moral coward by Democrats who called the Emancipation Proclamation “another advance on the Robespierrian highway of tyranny and anarchy.” His conservative supporters hated him for selling out to the radicals, and the radicals assailed him with “vehement and injurious demands for a more vigorous prosecution of the war.”23 McClellan’s habitual criticism of his bosses in Washington now deteriorated into withering scorn. “The good of the country requires me to submit to all this from men whom I know to be greatly my inferiors socially, intellectually & morally!” he wrote his wife, Ellen. He called Lincoln a “gorilla,” Stanton a “great villain,” Halleck “a fool . . . with no brains whatever!”24 Flushed with victory, he wanted nothing less than Stanton’s head and Halleck’s job.

  On October 26, six weeks after Lee’s withdrawal from Sharpsburg, and under considerable pressure from Washington, McClellan finally put his army on the road. And though this southward movement was accompanied by great fanfare in the Northern press and renewed cries of “On to Richmond!” the great march of the Army of the Potomac proved nothing but a slow, spiritless trudge. It took McClellan eight days to cross the Potomac and penetrate a mere twenty miles into Virginia, a task Jackson could have accomplished in a day with a barefoot army on half rations. In the meantime he had allowed Longstreet to slip between him and the Richmond defenses. He inched his way into the area around Warrenton, where on November 7 he encountered a howling snowstorm, proof positive that he had already waited too long to mount a major campaign.

  But McClellan’s brief, bright hour was over. That same day, while long lines formed in front of Mathew Brady’s gallery in New York City to see gruesome photographs of dead soldiers at Antietam, his Civil War career ended. Lincoln, long-suffering and almost preternaturally patient with his problem child, had finally had enough. During the snowstorm, Lincoln’s emissary, the picturesquely named Brigadier General Catharinus P. Buckingham, arrived to tell McClellan that he was relieved, effective immediately, and replaced by Major General Ambrose Burnside. And that was that. There would be no reinstatement this time, no glorious return with bugles blowing and soldiers hurrahing. Though McClellan took the news with surprising calm and dignity, he was bitterly disappointed. “I feel as if the Army of the Potomac belonged to me,” he wrote two days later. “It is mine. I feel that its officers are my brothers, its soldiers my children. This separation is like a forcible divorce of husband and wife.” Of Burnside he said accurately, “He is as sorry to assume command as I am to give it up.”25

  Burnside was a curious figure in the war. He truly did not believe he was up to the job of commanding the Army of the Potomac. He had been offered it twice before by Lincoln, once in July 1862, after the Seven Days fiasco, and once after Lee had embarked on his invasion of Maryland. Each time he had turned it down. He had tried to duck it this time, too, and had relented only when Buckingham informed him that refusing the job meant that his detested rival Joe Hooker would get it instead. That was Burnside in a nutshell: a decent, unambitious man who mistrusted his own abilities. Though he had not had much financial success in life prior to the war, he was not without intelligence and initiative. In 1853 he had left the military to attempt to manufacture and sell a single-shot, .54-caliber carbine of his own design. Though he went bankrupt, and the factory he had started passed from his ownership, the Union ended up purchasing fifty thousand of them. Known as the “Burnside carbine,” it became the third most popular such weapon in the war after the Sharps and Spencer. Its success contributed to Burnside’s wartime rise in the army. At the time the war started, Burnside was working as a cashier for the Illinois Central Railroad, run by George B. McClellan, who had graduated a class ahead of him at West Point. A strapping six-footer with luxuriant facial hair, Burnside was honestly humble and had a simple, frank, hearty manner that endeared him to his friends. He could also be stubborn to a fault. He had trouble sleeping.

  He was certainly smart enough to understand that his job now was to move, and move very quickly, in a southerly direction. He did just that. His grand plan, approved by Lincoln, was to feint toward Longstreet’s camps at Culpeper, then slide south and east toward Fredericksburg, cross the Rappahannock, and move directly on Richmond. The first part of the plan went well enough. Two advance corps arrived in the town of Falmouth, a mile upriver from Fredericksburg on the northern bank, on November 17, before Lee could shift his troops to block a crossing. But there they stopped: the pontoons Burnside neede
d to ferry his 110,000-man army across the river had not arrived. They would not arrive for a week, by which time Lee was dug in on the heights across the river.

  Lee had never intended to fight at Fredericksburg, and, unaware of Burnside’s pontoon problem, was wary of his enemy’s intentions. Thus he summoned Jackson, whose newly created 2nd Corps marched out of Winchester on November 22. The weather was cold and getting colder. Sleet, snow, and icy winds whipped the marching columns. The men awoke in the morning with frost in their hair and their food frozen in their haversacks. Many were barefoot, and some of their frozen feet bled as they marched, leaving traces of blood on the ground.26 Many were without blankets or tents.27 They came at a steady pace, marching 175 miles in twelve days, cresting the magnificent heights of the Blue Ridge—as some of them had done on Jackson’s dramatic backdoor march to Front Royal in his valley campaign—descending through the rolling, river-crossed Piedmont, and landing in full force in Fredericksburg on December 4.

  While Jackson marched eastward, his thoughts were of his wife, Anna, who was nine months pregnant and due to give birth any day. He had reason to be concerned. He had lost his first wife, Ellie, and a son in childbirth in 1854. His daughter Mary Graham, to whom Anna had given birth in 1858, had lived only a month. Two days before his departure for Fredericksburg he had written Anna, saying, “Don’t you wish you were here in Winchester? Our headquarters are about one hundred yards from Mr. Graham’s, in a large white house back of his, and in full view of our last winter’s quarters, where my esposa used to come up and talk with me. Wouldn’t it be nice for you to be here again?”28 In fact she would have been horrified to see the town, which had lately become a repository for the human debris of war. Makeshift hospitals overflowed with wounded from the Maryland campaign; a fire started by an exploding Union powder magazine had destroyed many of the town’s buildings, and others had simply been pulled apart for other uses. There was not a single item for sale in any Winchester store.29

  On November 28, while he was still camped near Gordonsville, Jackson received a note from his wife’s sister saying that Anna had given birth to a healthy, eight-and-a-half-pound girl at the family home near Charlotte, North Carolina. The letter was written in the voice of the new baby, saying, “My aunts both say I am a little beauty. My hair is dark and long, my eyes are blue, my nose straight just like papa’s. . . . My mother is very comfortable this morning, and hopes you will write and give me a name.”30 Jackson was joyous, and wrote to Anna, “Oh! How thankful I am to our kind Heavenly Father for having spared my precious wife and given us a little daughter!”31 He went on,